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F. Propuesta de Resolución
Although the Girls’ kickline did not refer directly to anything beyond its own abstract configurations, indirectly it seemed to reflect a modern aesthetic – one derived not from the individual body but from the machine (Jelavich 1996: 180).
Throughout the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1950s, European
entertainment culture was firmly based on the idea of kinesis and the representation of motion; specifically in relation with dynamic mass spectacle, machinery display, body-culture, film and urban development. New technological devices available allowed to easily portrait the illusion of movement, breaking with the static poses of photography, thus giving room to a smooth understanding of film composition and the new possibilities that emerged since the appearance of the kinetoscope and Lumière’s early experiments.42 The development of a body-culture in Weimar Germany, and its spreading to the rest of Europe and United States, introduced another aspect to urban entertainment. Within film industry, the idea of a specifically trained body that can perform for the camera transformed the idea of motion into a perfect machinery, able to display the human body and its parts. This helped construct a notion of welfare from different perspectives: firstly, the cinematic experience that focuses on the actual body and its capacities; secondly, the technological developments that were displayed as innovations; and finally, the specific development of mass spectacle, such as Nazi
42 Tom Gunning’s article “The Attraction of Motion: Modern Representation and the Image
of Movement” in the book Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture (London: John Libbey Publishing Ltd., 2009), presents some interesting ideas regarding motion in early cinema and its tendency toward the introduction of narrative.
mass demonstrations,43 and organised collective images of music hall shows. The emergence of this phenomenon will serve us as a basis from which to understand urban culture in relation to body, specifically focusing on the appearance of the Tiller Girls.
The most frequently cited choreography of industrial capitalism was precision dancing. The kickline, in particular, was burned into twentieth-century cultural memory by the British Tiller Girls and immortalized in Kracauer’s 1927 essay
The Mass Ornament (Franko 2002: 31).
When John Tiller (1854 – 1925), a cotton tycoon from Manchester,44 went bankrupt,
he decided to set up on stage a distinct form of dance that included perfectly coordinated dance steps for groups of ten to twenty Chorus Girls that danced in perfect unison, conceiving “what would become his signature system for the formal training of chorus girl troupes” (Brown 2008: 165). Within the context of dance and music-hall skirt dance performers – girls’ kickline, cancan, and all sorts of female dancers arranged in harmonious chorus lines – this new outstanding arrangement of Girls appeared to satisfy all requirements of an entertaining show in a structure that also portrayed ideas of serialisation, repetition and standardisation of movements proper to modern society. John Tiller and his second wife founded a series of
residential schools in England. They trained young girls, offering them an alternative to industrial work and a way to escape from poverty environments and its “corrupting effects;” specially “to avoid the temptations of the streets – the evils of sex, drink, and idleness - which they were seen as particularly vulnerable to” (Brown 2008: 165). Tiller himself stated: “In most cases I try to separate the children from their old home life, for in most cases their homes may not be of the best” (quoted in Brown 2008: 165). After Tiller’s death, his son Lawrence took over the direction of the company, and a new troupe of Girls was born after his name. Tiller’s ideas quickly spread and a series of training schools and Girls troupes started to appear all around Europe and United States.
43 Hitler made a clever use of mass spectacles to rally German people behind the Nazi regime.
Some of them (for example the annual party rallies at Nuremburg) mobilized almost one million people.
44 Some documents affirm that Tiller’s factory was settled in the city of Lancaster, where he
developed the initial ideas for the Tiller Girls and then moved to Manchester in order to catch young women for his show.
Wayburn’s school promised ‘Health, Fame, Popularity, Independence;’ his training system for chorus girls was designed to mould their flesh into the ideal physical manifestation of the new modern ethos – self-cultivated, entitled, and white. Beauty was mass-produced for the consumer. ‘In our school we make a business to produce beauty’, Wayburn declared. ‘Neither sentiment nor art enters the question. Audiences will not come to the box office with their money to see ugly, misshapen girls on the stage. Therefore it is up to me to make them right’ (Brown 2008: 167).
This quotation, from Jayna Brown’s book Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers
and the Shaping of the Modern, helps us to understand a whole system of
segmentation of girls based on physical capacities. Girls were classified in function of their routines, and divided between “showgirls” and “ponies”. They were measured to match the “five feet four inches” criteria, and to weight no more than 105 to 115 pounds (between 47.7 and 52.3 kilograms). After the selection process, the Girls started training for more than 12 hours a day, with specific attention to their feet and hands.
Brought to market, women were the product described in terms from both merchant and industrial capitalism. The dance instructor David Bennett assessed the women applicants as a horse trainer would his livestock. (…) he stated in an interview. ‘I look first at their teeth. Good teeth are the initial beauty essential of the chorus girl … I have always chosen girls with the idea, first, of getting healthy ones. Posture has much to do with my selection. If the girl doesn’t sit well, I know she has let herself become slouchy. She probably has been too lazy to brace herself properly at the waist, where the vital organs are’ (Brown 2008: 167).
Tiller Girls’ first public appearance was in 1890 at the King’s Theatre in Manchester, and by the 1920s several Tiller troupes were performing in different cities in Europe and the United States. This systemic approach to dance training hit its climax after World War I, when the number of women on stage dramatically increased to hundreds, dancing and creating corridors, mirror-like images, reflecting urban patterns, mechanistic images, industrial assembly lines, and military training. Before World War II, the Great Depression marked the end of several revues, especially in Germany and Europe, starting a period of adjustment to a new economic system. What is relevant for this thesis is the idea that specifically trained bodies became productive agents within the entertainment industry. Their rigorous dance routines
reflected a discipline that transformed the Girls into productive workers whose trademark was serialisation and quantity, reducing the space for individual performance. The Girls were trained to look the same, weigh the same, move the same and smile the same in a progressive lengthening of the kick-line. Therefore it can be said that the Tiller Girls were closely trained to mould their personalities, fading away the individuality of each performer into a formal configuration of a collective Girl entity harmonised in uniform precision. This created a series of young dancers who were fundamentally depersonalised and dismembered into a large composition of dynamic body-parts.
The Tiller Girls cannot be reassembled retrospectively into human beings; the mass gymnastics are never undertaken by total and complete bodies, whose contortions defy rational understanding. Arms, tights, and other parts are the smallest components of the composition (Kracauer 1931: n.p.).
What Siegfried Kracauer, in his 1931 article “Girls und Krise (Girls and Crisis)” states, is that the Tiller Girls composition and the set up of the spectacle replicates the sensation of worker’s bodies, particularly when he clearly points out that “the legs of the Tiller Girls correspond to the hands in the factories” (Kracauer 1931: n.p.). The depersonalisation and the fragmentation of body movement, the serialised spatial composition of the lines, and the over-exploitation of the similarity with no space for
difference create a mass spectacle that symbolises an economic system, a mechanised
environment, an abstract and geometrical perception of the body; a “depersonalization of the dancer” that “paralleled the reduction of the worker’s body to economically useful attributes” (Jelavich 1996: 183).
The human fragments were recorded into dynamic visual forms which, on the surface, appeared vital and progressive, a symbol of rational management and achievement. But more fundamentally, they revealed – or perhaps disguised? – an underlying sense of economic and military order that demanded the dissolution of all personality and the dismemberment of the person (ibid., 186).
Each Girl is considered as an appendage, and even more significantly, each body part of each Girl is considered as a constituent for a higher – entertainment, productive – purpose: the unison kick-line. There is no dramatic unit. Instead, the Tiller Girls created a sense of “dismembered succession of splendid sensory perceptions”
(Kracauer quoted in Jelavich 1996: 186) created by body-parts, where the serialised fragments constitute the parts of the whole. This final product is fundamentally an economic order that matches the hierarchical criteria of Fordist organisation and the productive system of the assembly line. This specifically economical sense leads to the dissolution of all personality, portraying an absolute – and also fragmented – body motion that has been categorised as “precision machine” or “motion machine”, a collective ornament that embodies the modern economical utopia depicting “the functioning of the flourishing economy” (Kracauer 1931: n.p.).
Fig 2.9 A line-up of Tiller Girls in a cabaret show at the Piccadilly Hotel in London. 1925. Image from http://1920s.livejournal.com/
Therefore, the Tiller Girls can be understood as part of the entertainment industry, alienated and abstract workers that become a part of a public productive line. For Mark Franko, in his 2002 book The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in
the 1930s, the female dancer of the kick-line parallels the male worker of Taylorist
systematisation, representing a broad economical and labouring system, “thus the commodification of the chorus girl is exactly parallel to the commodification of the
worker” (Franko 2002, 36). Franko explains – following Kracauer’s ideas – how the organisation of the dancing body is limited to specialised tasks in a similar way to Taylorist’s scientific management, in which dancers were specially trained to function as a part of the kick-line routines, in a social and even political portrait of labour organisation.
When they formed a line that moved up and down, they radiantly represented the superiority of the conveyor belt; when they step-danced at a rapid pace, it sounded like ‘business, business’; when they tossed their legs into the air with mathematical precision, they joyfully approved the progress of rationalization; and when they continually repeated the same motions, without breaking their line, one imagined an uninterrupted chain of automobiles streaming from the factories of the world (Kracauer 1931: n.p.).
Kracauer’s famous essay, “The Mass Ornament”, was published in 1927 in the
Frankfurter Zeitung before the rise of National Socialists in Germany, in the middle
of an economic boom. In it, Kracauer links the aesthetics of the Tiller Girls with that of Taylorist factories and with gymnastic displays, identifying the Tiller Girls with an image of collective totality; an anonymous sense of precision that was more than a mere expression of modern times and its rhythm. Hence, it is my belief that the Fordist approach to serialisation, speed increment, mass production and
fragmentation, works as an equivalent to the alienation of metropolitan life and therefore, with Kracauer’s symbolic understanding of the Tiller Girls and their performance.
For Kracauer, the idea of mass ornament included both precision chorus girls and mass gymnastic spectacle – also including Nazi mass demonstrations – where the individual was submerged into a mass collective corporeality, blurring out any possibility for difference and becoming a unitary mass, especially as a symptom of modern society. Within this context, and considering ideas on Fordism, production is understood as an anonymous mass of specific tasks that only make sense within an abstract recognition of the totality. “The mass ornament”, he argues, “manifests progressive potential as the representation of a new type of collectivity organised not according to the natural bonds of community but as a social mass of functionally linked individuals” (Kracauer 1963, 18). If for Kracauer “the bearer of the ornaments is the mass and not the people” (Kracauer 1927: n.p.), for Ford, production agents are
the mass of workers as a whole, and not individual task routines. This means that both – mass ornament and capitalist production – are considered ends in themselves.
The ornament is an end in itself [Selbstzweck]. … The girl units train … in order to produce innumerable parallel lines; and the training [Ertüchtigung] of considerable human masses would be desirable in order to generate a pattern of undreamed-of dimensions. The final result is the ornament, for whose closed uniformity [Geschlossenheit] the substance-containing structures are emptied [of their content] (Kracauer 1963: 52).
Serialisation, assemblage, and regularity are reproduced into abstract motifs of a broad mass of people, mirroring a social pattern that includes, and arises from, the development of a body-culture, the establishment of the film industry, and essentially from intricate production processes where everybody has an assigned task, playing a partial function within the entire procedure.
The patterns seen in the stadiums and cabarets (…) are composed of elements that are mere building blocks and nothing more. The construction of the edifice depends on the size of the stones and their number. It is the mass that is
employed here. Only as parts of a mass, not as individuals who believe themselves to be formed from within, do people become fractions of a figure (Kracauer 1963: n.p.).
Consequently, I would like to reinforce the idea that the main concepts involved in both productive processes and entertainment culture, establish a social apparatus based on technical transformations and a new kinaesthetic understanding of the body. The Fordist production line was based on technological development, technical improvement, and the analysis of movement patterns for the increment of production. The highly hierarchical organisation of factories and the mechanising rhythms of labour were common subjects in a variety of films during early 1920s and 1930s commonly portraying a mass of abstract workers, mass ornament, mass dancers and mass propaganda. Additionally, Kracauer’s ideas on entertainment culture and mass ornament support my contention that specific forms of movement control – like the ones explained in this chapter – create a scenario from where to understand an
organisational system that determined both the productive process as a massive figure with strict implications on social life, and the entertainment culture as a productive agent, where “the organization stands above the masses” (Kracauer 1963: 78). Accordingly, it can be said that the industrial systematisation that prioritises
efficiency and mass production was conceptually applied to how humans should behave and relate to one another for the “enhancement” of society. This process can be understood as an individual internalisation of mechanised production through an ideologically and aesthetically reevaluation of the human body as a machine: the legs and arms moving in synchronicity as part of an abstract spectacle of a collective machine. This machine aesthetics emphasises the notion of repetition, efficiency, speed, precision and power through an overall rhythmic flow. The Tiller Girls performance of standardised movements choreographed into exact precision, aesthetically symbolises the industrial and modern technology proper of the twentieth-century.
Admittedly, it is the legs of the Tiller Girls that swing in perfect parallel, not the natural unity of their bodies, and it is also true that the thousands of people in the stadium form one single star. But this star does not shine, and the legs of the Tiller Girls are an abstract designation of their bodies (Kracauer 1963: 84).
Therefore, the systematisation of production through movement and gesture administration within Fordist industries can be considered in strict relation to mass forms of entertainment like cinema and chorus line dances. The hierarchical organisation and the presentation of serialised movements determine a new social understanding and quantification of body movements in both artistic and productive performance. The new systematisation of motion and the extreme forms of
organisation applied to serialise production appears to be similar to the
systematisation of movement of the Tiller Girls. Consequently, and in correlation with the ideas presented in the first chapter of this thesis, the main concepts involved in both contexts establish a link: a social transformation derived from technological developments. A new harmonisation of body movements became an adaptation to new rhythms and compositions, where the Girls – as the worker did for Fordism – adapt to the speed of the machine.